—
Hitler was no longer at the front when these events took place. On 21 August he had gone to Nuremberg to take part in a course for radio and telephone operators, and after that, from 10 to 27 September, he spent his second home furlough in Berlin. With the exception of a brief remark he made in his headquarters in October 1941, we have no accounts of this time. Hitler seems to have spent most of it on Berlin’s Museum Island, looking at the various art collections, and we do not know whether he saw the signs of impending revolutionary crisis or ignored them.106 After he returned to the front, his regiment took up position near Comines, where it had first been stationed in the autumn of 1914, although now it was charged with repulsing British attacks, not going on the offensive. In the night of 13–14 October, Hitler and several of his comrades became the victims of a mustard gas attack. “As morning dawned, the pain was increasing by the quarter of an hour, and around seven, I stumbled back with burning eyes, clutching my last message of the war,” Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf. “A few hours later, my eyes had turned into burning coals, and everything had grown dark around me.”107 He was given emergency treatment in a Bavarian army field hospital near Oudenaarde and then taken to the reserve military hospital in Pasewalk near Stettin (today the city of Szeczin in Poland). He arrived on 21 October. This is where Hitler experienced the beginning of the German revolution of 1918–19.
Scholars today still disagree on how close Hitler came to going blind and what sort of treatment he received in Pasewalk.108 His patient file went missing but it seems fairly certain that the poison gas attack had left him with inflammation of the conjunctiva and the eyelids, and that, at least temporarily, he could hardly see. In a letter from 1921, Hitler himself reported that in the Pasewalk hospital his blindness had receded relatively quickly and his vision gradually returned.109 The supposition that Hitler was never seriously poisoned by mustard gas and that his “blindness” was caused by hysteria is far less likely. And there is no truth whatsoever to the wild theory that one of the doctors who treated him, psychiatrist Edmund Forster, cured his hysterical blindness using hypnosis but forgot to wake Hitler from his trance, thus turning the later dictator into a victim of medical negligence.110
No doubt the news of Germany’s military collapse and the revolutionary unrest of early November 1918 shook Hitler greatly. He had felt comfortable as a soldier and had grown fond of his regiment, and suddenly everything he identified with was simply wiped out. For Hitler and many others who blindly hoped for a positive outcome to the war, the search for scapegoats had begun—and what could have been easier than to look where the Pan-Germanic League and the far right had already identified them? In the autumn of 1918, as Germany acknowledged military defeat, right-wing propaganda intensified. Defamation of Jewish “shirkers” and “wartime profiteers” was now combined with the stab-in-the-back legend, which held that the German army at the front had been undermined and cheated of victory by traitorous Jews and Social Democrats at home. Military leaders and their supporters used such fairy tales in an attempt to avoid responsibility for the demise of the empire. In late October 1918, the deputy chairman of the Pan-Germanic League, Lord Konstantin von Gebsattel, was already calling for the “situation to be used for fanfares against the Jews who should be made into lightning rods for all the injustice.”111
In Mein Kampf, Hitler tried to represent his shock at German defeat and revolution as a political epiphany. In early November 1918, he claimed, revolutionary sailors had already appeared in Pasewalk. A few days later, Hitler wrote, an “abominable intimation” became reality. On 10 November, the hospital chaplain told the patients that the Hohenzollern dynasty had been deposed and that Germany was now a republic. When the aged clergyman added that the war was lost and Germany was dependent on the “mercy of the victors,” Hitler was overcome:
Everything went black again, and I felt and stumbled my way back to my sickbed and buried my burning head in my blanket and pillow…Everything had been in vain…Must not now the graves open of all the hundreds of thousands who had once marched out, believing in the fatherland, never to return?…Had everything happened only so that a band of criminals could get their hands on our fatherland?…In the nights that followed, my hatred grew, my hatred for those responsible for this deed.
Hitler closed this passage with the oft-cited sentence: “I decided to become a politician.”112
But Hitler did not make any such sudden determination. His decision to put his artistic and architectural ambitions on the back burner and devote himself to politics seems to have gradually coalesced during 1919. The historian Ernst Deuerlein was right when he wrote: “Hitler did not come to politics—politics came to Hitler.”113 As far as his ideological development was concerned, the Pasewalk episode marks the transition between the defining experience of war and the equally defining experience of revolution and counter-revolution in Munich. Hitler’s hatred for the “November criminals” combined phobia of the Left with resentment of Jews. But he would have to go through further life-changing experiences before the bête noire of “Jewish Bolshevism” would become the focus of his world view.
4
The Leap into Politics
“I became a politician against my will,” Hitler claimed in January 1942. “Some people think it will be tough for me when I’m no longer as busy as I am now. On the contrary, the day I leave politics and put all the worries, hardships and irritations behind me will be the happiest of my life.”1 The notion that Hitler only got into politics out of love for his country, and that his actual calling was that of an artist, was part of the dictator’s carefully maintained image. In fact, politics was the one arena in which he could use his rhetorical talents and demagogic skills. As hesitant as he was when he initially tested the waters, Hitler would soon trump all his rivals within the chauvinist-nationalist camp and become the Führer of a far-right-wing party of brawlers.
Hitler’s political career began in Munich, and the post-war Bavarian capital contained all the conditions that made Hitler’s rise possible in the first place. With the declaration of the Bavarian Soviet Republic in the spring of 1919 the radical pendulum swung very far to the left, and the counter-revolution was correspondingly radical on the right. Hitler instinctively knew how to exploit this situation. He also had some influential patrons in military circles helping to pave his way into politics.
On 19 November 1918, Hitler was discharged from the hospital in Pasewalk. The private, who by this time was almost 30 years old, was one of millions of ordinary soldiers who returned to their home garrisons for demobilisation. His mood must have been bleak. He had no job, no family and no real social contacts, and he faced the prospect of being plunged back into his insecure pre-war existence. When he returned to Munich on 21 November, his only plan was to delay getting discharged from the army for as long as possible. He was assigned to the 7th Company of the 1st Replacement Battalion of the 2nd Infantry Regiment. There he met again several of his former comrades from RIR 16, including Ernst Schmidt.2
Things were changing apace in the Bavarian capital. Revolution broke out on 7 November, two days before it did in Berlin. The leader was Kurt Eisner, the chairman of Munich’s tiny USPD faction, who had only been released in mid-October from Stadelheim prison, where he had been incarcerated since the January strikes. In the late afternoon of 7 November, after a mass demonstration in Munich’s Theresienwiese park, Eisner bravely led a gang of followers and stormed one military garrison after another. They met with no resistance. It was a clear sign of how hollow monarchist authority had become in Bavaria during the war. The next morning, the revolutionaries proclaimed a “Free State of Bavaria” on bright red placards and declared that the Wittelsbach dynasty had been deposed. That afternoon, the USPD and the MSPD formed a joint government. Eisner became both president and foreign minister while the chairman of the MSPD, Erhard Auer, took over the Interior Ministry; from the outset, he was Eisner’s main cabinet rival.3 The fact that the revolution pro
ceeded non-violently and that the first pronouncements of the new government were quite moderate helped extend support for the president well beyond the working classes. “Isn’t it something wonderful? We’ve achieved a revolution without shedding a drop of blood!” Eisner declared. “It’s a historical first!”4
The turbulence of the early days of November had calmed down by the time Hitler returned to Munich, but tension quickly developed in the governing cabinet between Eisner and the MSPD ministers. Like their colleagues in the Council of People’s Deputies in revolutionary Berlin, the MSPD cabinet members were vigorously opposed to enshrining the workers’ and soldiers’ councils or soviets—as they were named after the Russian example—which had formed spontaneously at the start of the revolution, in a future democratic constitution. They regarded them as provisional institutions that would only exist until the election of a constitutional convention. Eisner, on the other hand, favoured cooperation between the soviets and parliament, and this put him on a collision course with Auer, who pushed for early Bavarian elections in the hope of making the soviets obsolete and undermining Eisner’s position. After a meeting of ministers on 5 December, the election was scheduled for 12 January 1919.
Another point of conflict was Eisner’s clear admission of German war guilt. On 23 November, he allowed the Berliner Tageblatt newspaper to publish excerpts of reports made by the Bavarian consul in Berlin from July and August 1914, which proved that the Reich leadership had ramped up the conflict between Austria–Hungary and Serbia as a way of bringing about a decisive test of strength with the Entente.5 Eisner’s move not only attracted condemnation from the MSPD ministers but opened him up to accusations of “treason” from nationalists. Eisner now became the target of vitriolic anti-Semitic attacks. The son of a Jewish merchant from Berlin, and a career journalist in the SPD, Eisner was defamed as a “Galician Jew,” whose real name was supposedly Salomon Kosmanowsky. “Will we be able to believe in the future that we tolerated such blackguards in Germany for even one single day?” the outraged navy captain Bogislaw von Selchow asked in his diary on 25 November 1918.6
According to a statement by Ernst Schmidt, Hitler did not talk much about the revolution upon returning to Munich, but it was clear “how bitter he felt.”7 He had no love lost for the Wittelsbach dynasty. He was more dismayed that soldiers’ soviets now had their say in the garrisons, which offended his sense of order and discipline. “I found the whole business so disgusting that I decided to leave as soon as possible,” he wrote in Mein Kampf.8 He was probably even more offended by the atmosphere of exuberance that broke out in Munich and other big cities in the first weeks and months after the revolution. All of Germany was hit by a dance craze. It was taking on “terrible dimensions,” one member of Eisner’s ministerial cabinet complained: “Women are going crazy, and tavern owners are powerless to stop them.”9
Given the circumstances, Hitler probably welcomed it when he and Schmidt were transferred to the southern Bavarian town of Traunstein im Chiemgau in December 1918. There they were assigned as guards in a camp for prisoners of war and civilian inmates. Hitler spent more than a month in Traunstein, and during that time he again disappears almost completely from view. Before the camp was dissolved in mid-January—and not, as he recalled in Mein Kampf, in March—Hitler returned to Munich.10 In mid-February, the replacement battalion of the 2nd Infantry Regiment was restructured, and Hitler was assigned to the 2nd Demobilisation Company. Next to nothing is known about his activities in this period. He probably spent most of his time in the barracks. Occasionally, resuming his old habits, he appears to have gone to the opera with Schmidt. From 20 February to 8 March he may have been ordered to stand guard at Munich’s central train station, but this cannot be verified.11
Meanwhile, conflicts were becoming radicalised in a way that would completely change the face of the revolution in Munich and Bavaria. The spark was Eisner’s murder on 21 February 1919. That day the president was on his way to the Bavarian parliament, the Landtag, to dissolve his cabinet after his party had suffered a crushing defeat in the election of 12 January. The USPD had received only 2.5 per cent of the vote and 3 parliamentary seats compared with 33 per cent and 61 seats for the MSPD. The strongest party was the Bavarian People’s Party (BVP), which received 35 per cent of the vote and 66 seats, even though it had only been founded the previous November. Eisner’s assassin, who shot him twice in the back of the head, was a 22-year-old army lieutenant and Munich University law student, Count Anton Arco auf Valley. In a note he wrote before the attack, Arco described his motivations: “Eisner is a Bolshevist and a Jew. He’s not German. He doesn’t feel German and he undermines all patriotic thoughts and emotions. He is a traitor to his country.”12 Only a few hours after the murder, the barman Alois Lindner, who was a member of the workers’ council, fired two shots at Eisner’s rival Auer, seriously wounding him. The revolutionary elements within Munich’s working classes were convinced that Auer had been complicit in the assassination since he had done everything in his power to damage Eisner’s public reputation in the preceding months.
“We are beginning to suspect that the bullet that killed Eisner has ushered in a new epoch of the revolution,” the writer Ricarda Huch noted in her diary on 26 February.13 Her hunch was right. On 22 February, delegates of the workers’ and soldiers’ soviets from all over Bavaria assembled in Munich to form a “Central Soviet of the Bavarian Republic.” The Augsburg schoolteacher Ernst Niekisch, a member of the left wing of the MSPD, was elected chairman. After difficult negotiations with representatives of the soviets and the political parties, the Central Soviet decided to reconvene the Landtag, which had been dissolved. On 17 March, that body elected Johannes Hoffmann, the former minister of culture in the Eisner government, as Bavaria’s new state president. But he was unable to calm the turmoil within the working classes. The news that Hungary had become a republic of soviets under the leadership of Béla Kun encouraged all those who dreamed of a similar experiment in Munich, and in the night of 6–7 April, the Central Soviet proclaimed a Bavarian Soviet Republic. The Hoffmann government fled to Bamberg, where it declared itself to be “the sole legitimate power in Bavaria.”14
“It’s the first part of Germany to go Bolshevik,” the art patron and diplomat Count Harry Kessler commented. “If the Communists hang on there, it will be a German and European event of the first order.”15 Yet the Communists themselves refused to get involved. The head of the Bavarian branch of the newly formed German Communist Party (KPD), Eugen Leviné, rejected the new government as “a fake soviet republic,” since it was headed by men who had previously treated Communists with deep mistrust. The new chairman of the Central Soviet was the writer Ernst Toller, who had gone from military volunteer to pacifist in the course of the war and had joined the USPD. The twelve representatives in the soviet government included respected figures like the independent socialist and writer Gustav Landauer, who took over the Education Ministry, as well as eccentrics like the anarchist Silvio Gesell, whose unorthodox suggestions for reforming the currency created a panic among Bavaria’s wealthy.
The Toller experiment only lasted a week. After the Hoffmann government and loyalist troops failed in their attempt on 13 April, Palm Sunday, to overthrow the Soviet Republic in a putsch, the Communists under Leviné decided that their time had come. That very night, a conference of factory and garrison soviets declared the Central Soviet dissolved. A fifteen-member committee was appointed as the new government, with a five-member council serving as its executive and Leviné as its chairman. A nine-day general strike was called to give workers the opportunity to form a “Red Army.”
The central government in Berlin had now had enough. On 16 April, Reich Prime Minister Philipp Scheidemann (MSPD) announced to his cabinet that he would approve the Hoffmann government’s request for military support. The Prussian lieutenant Ernst von Oven was put in charge of the mission. The troops who intervened included paramilitary Freikorps volunteers under Franz Ritter
von Epp and his right-hand man, later SA leader Ernst Röhm, as well as a navy brigade under Captain Hermann Ehrhardt, who would be one of the leaders of the Kapp putsch in March 1920.16 The hastily assembled units of the “Red Army” under sailor Rudolf Egelhofer had no chance against this force of 30,000 men.
By late April, Munich was completely encircled. Deliveries of food were no longer reaching the Bavarian capital, and the city’s monetary system collapsed. Last-minute attempts to avoid bloodshed failed. Reich Defence Minister Gustav Noske (MSPD) wanted to make an example of Munich, and Egelhofer drastically overestimated his followers’ determination. Apparently on the latter’s orders, the left-wing rebels shot and killed ten hostages, including seven members of the far-right-wing Thule Society, in the Luitpold Gymnasium on 30 April. The executions came as revenge for atrocities committed by the Freikorps as they marched on Munich, but the public was outraged by the “hostage murder.” The adherents of the Soviet Republic also vigorously denounced it, but the event remained alive in Munich’s collective memory as an example of “the Red reign of terror.” In terms of cruelty, however, it was dwarfed by the deeds of the Reich troops as they marched on Munich and entered the city in early May.
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